20,000 fell as Somme began

The Staffordshire Territorials took part in the attack on that horrific first day, and while the fighting went on for another five months, it is that first day that remains forever in the national conscience.

The Staffordshires took part in a diversionary attack at the heavily fortified German salient around the village of Gommecourt at the northern end of the Somme battlefield.

Their failure was just one of the many costly failures that day. The casualties among the four battalions of Staffordshires, including men from Wolverhampton, Walsall, Stafford, Rugeley and Lichfield, as well as the 56th (London) Division, amounted to nearly 7,000 men.

The intention had been to capture the village and divert attention away from the southern part of the Somme battlefield. But the Staffords' divisional commanding officer, Major General Stuart Wortley, called off the attack in the afternoon as he saw the offensive was hopeless and that he was sending wave after wave of men to their slaughter. He was sacked for his decision.

In the aftermath of the first day, the commanding officer of the 6th North Staffordshire battalion, Major General E.H.Tomlinson, penned an account of the day which serves as a good example of how the set-piece attacks that characterised the Allied tactics at that point in the war were doomed to failure.

The officer, who had taken over command from Lieut. Col Charles Boote who was killed on the first day, blamed inadequate preparation, inflexible plans, lack of surprise and a complete inability to control the battle once it had started.

He wrote: "On the night of June 30/July 1st the Battalion took up its dispositions as ordered.

The attack, which was preceded by an intense bombardment of 65 minutes, was launched at 7.30am under cover of smoke.

The weather was fine and the breeze favourable for this, but in one part of our lines the man in charge of the smoke was wounded immediately before the smoke was to begin, and as he had no understudy, this part of the line was missed out...

As soon as the smoke started, the enemy opened heavy machine gun fire all along our parapet, and put a strong artillery barrage on our advanced, old front line and retrentchment works.

"The front line wave advanced at the correct time in a good line, but at once came under such heavy fire that many casualties were suffered before the German line was reached.

Here further losses were experienced as the men, being unable to see the gaps cut by our military in the German wire, owing to our smoke, ran right on to it, were then hung up, and immediately shot.

According to the account of one of our officers, the German wire was not well cut and in some places, new wire had been put in. Only about 20 of this wave reached the German front line, which they found strongly manned. They were greeted with a hail of bombs, and practically wiped out.

The few survivors lay down under the parapet where they remained all day. After dark they managed to crawl back to our lines. Of the four officers who were with this wave, two were killed and two wounded.

The second wave started at the correct distance of 80 yards behind the first. It took them, three minutes to get out of our trenches and through our wire.

This was owing to the extremely wet and muddy state of our trenches; the mud in our trenches was from one to two feet deep and, as it was just beginning to dry, was very thick and sticky. This was so much so that several men had to be assisted out.

"The third wave had to get out of the same trench as the second, also took three minutes for the same reason, which made it late, but as the waves in front were going slowly owing to our smoke, which made the advance difficult, their distance from the second wave was not more than 100 yards.

"The fourth wave, which started from our retrenchment trench up communication trenches to our old front line and thence over the top, laboured under similar difficulties, and having further to go, was not deployed in front of our wire till the third wave was 120 yards in front.

The men in this wave carried the bomb carriers and bomb bags and, owing to the weight, experienced difficulty in getting out of our trench, and also in getting them through the narrow gaps in our wires."

The four Territorial battalions who together made up the 46th (North Midland) Division returned to the Somme the following year to reclaim the bodies of their colleagues who had been caught up in the German wires and shot.

The Staffords had gone over the top on July 1 assured that the 18-mile German frontline would have been obliterated in the five-day bombardment involving 1,350 guns and 52,000 tons of explosives that preceded the battle.

All the troops had been told it would be a simple case of strolling across No Man's Land and taking possession of the German trenches. Beyond that lay Berlin.

The assault was designed to relieve the pressure on the French Army which had suffered greatly at Verdun, the longest single battle of the First World War. The British Army at the Somme consisted mainly of Kitchener recruits, like the Staffords, most of whom had received only basic training. Many still had not learned to shoot accurately.

Some 57,000 men fell on the first day alone, 19,240 of them dead. In return, the Germans suffered thousands of casualties.

On July 14, following a partially successful night-time attack, the British sent in the cavalry. In his book World War One, author Rupert Colley described it as 'a rare sight on the Western Front in the First World War and one that stirred the romantic notions in old timers such as Haig.' But the horses became bogged down in the mud, the Germans opened fire and few survived, either horse or man.

By contrast, two months later, Haig introduced the modern equivalent of the cavalry on to the battlefield – the tank. Originated in Britain and championed by Winston Churchill, the term 'tank' was at first merely a codename to conceal its proper name – landship.

Despite advice to wait for more testing, Haig insisted on its use at the Somme. He got his way and the introduction of 32 tanks met with mixed results.

Many broke down although a few managed to penetrate German lines. But, as always, the Germans soon plugged the hole forged by the tanks and they failed to break the deadlock. All the same, Haig was impressed and immediately ordered 1,000 more.

The Battle of the Somme ground on for a further two months. Nine Victoria Crosses were awarded on the first day alone; another 41 by the end of the battle.

Soldiers from every part of the Empire were thrown into the melee – Australian, Canadian, New Zealanders, Indian and South African all took their part.

Although Haig was severely criticised for the costly battle, his willingness to commit massive amounts of men and resources to the stalemate along the Western Front did eventually contribute to the collapse of an exhausted Germany in 1918.

The battle finally ended on November 18, after 140 days of fighting. 400,000 British and Commonwealth lives were lost, 200,000 French and 400,000 German. For this, the Allies gained only a few miles.

The Germans, having been pushed back, merely bolstered the already heavily-fortified second line, the Hindenburg Line.

As AJP Taylor put it in his First World War, first published in 1963: "Idealism perished at the Battle of the Somme.

The enthusiastic volunteers were enthusiastic no longer."

The dreadful irony would be that within 14 months the ground won at such great cost to human life would be swept back under control of the German Army in the spring offensive of March and April 1918.